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Mashed Marmalade

A marmalade made by boiling orange skins, mashing them, and cooking with sugar and lemon juice to a jelly consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Mashed Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wipe the oranges with a clean towel and cut them into quarters over a sieve to catch the juice.

  2. Remove the pulp and place the skins in a pot with cold water.

  3. Cover and boil until tender.

  4. Scrape off the white part from the skins and mash them in a mortar.

Make the marmalade

  1. For every pound of fruit, use an equal amount of sugar.

  2. Boil and clarify the sugar.

  3. Add the mashed skins to the clarified sugar.

  4. Press the juice through with a wooden spoon.

  5. Add the lemon juice.

  6. Combine everything in a pot.

  7. Boil and continue until it reaches a jelly consistency.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide the peel, which supplies bitterness and aroma, and the juice for the set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a jelly as it cooks down.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity, which brightens the flavour and supports the jelly set.

The step that matters

Boil until it reaches a jelly consistency. Pectin in the fruit sets only when enough sugar and acid are present and the mixture reaches the right concentration. Undercooked marmalade stays runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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